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ARISTOTLE POLITICS BK II CH 3 1261B

"that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill"

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Vice President Biden has not closed the door to a presidential run, according to NBC News sources, but it is far from clear he will enter the 2016 campaign, with much of the Democratic Party already behind Hillary Clinton.

Posts Tagged ‘debauchery’

Published: March 7, 2011

Albert W. Florence was held for eight days in two counties on a civil contempt charge, even though he had paid the relevant fine.

Albert W. Florence believes that black men who drive nice cars in New Jersey run a risk of being questioned by the police. For that reason, he kept handy a 2003 document showing he had paid a court-imposed fine stemming from a traffic offense, just in case.

It did not seem to help.

In March 2005, Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled it over for speeding. His wife, April, was driving. His 4-year-old son, Shamar, was in the back.

The trooper ran a records search, and he found an outstanding warrant based on the supposedly unpaid fine. Mr. Florence showed the trooper the document, but he was arrested anyway.

A failure to pay a fine is not a crime. It is, rather, what New Jersey law calls a nonindictable offense. Mr. Florence was nonetheless held for eight days in two counties on a charge of civil contempt before matters were sorted out.

“Turn around,” he remembered being told while he stood naked before several guards and prisoners. “Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.”

The treatment stung. “I consider myself a man’s man,” said Mr. Florence, a finance executive for a car dealership. “Six-three. Big guy. It was humiliating. It made me feel less than a man. It made me feel not better than an animal.”

The Supreme Court is likely to decide this month whether to hear Mr. Florence’s caseagainst officials in New Jersey over the searches, and there is reason to think it will.

The federal courts of appeal are divided over whether blanket policies requiring jailhouse strip-searches of people arrested for minor offenses violate the Fourth Amendment. Eight courts have ruled that such searches are proper only if there is a reasonable suspicion that the arrested person has weapons or contraband.

The more recent trend, from appeals courts in Atlanta, San Francisco and Philadelphia, is to allow searches no matter how minor the charge. Some potential examples cited by dissenting judges in those cases: violating a leash law, driving without a license, failing to pay child support.

Although the judges in the majority in Mr. Florence’s case, the one heard in Philadelphia, said they had been presented with no evidence that the searches were needed, they nonetheless ruled that they would not second-guess corrections officials who said they feared that people like Mr. Florence would smuggle contraband into their jails.

On the one hand, such visits are planned and may provide opportunities for smuggling contraband in a way that unanticipated arrests do not. On the other, as Judge Marvin E. Frankel of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote in the case in 1977, contact visits take place in front of guards. “The secreting of objects in rectal or genital areas becomes in this situation an imposing challenge to nerves and agility,” Judge Frankel wrote.

The recent decisions allowing strip-searches of all arrestees have said they were authorized by the Supreme Court’s Bell decision. In the Atlanta case, Judge Ed Carnes said that new inmates enter facilities there after “one big and prolonged contact visit with the outside world.”

In Mr. Florence’s case, the majority used interesting reasoning to justify routine strip-searches.

“It is plausible,” Judge Thomas M. Hardiman wrote, “that incarcerated persons will induce or recruit others to subject themselves to arrest on nonindictable offenses to smuggle weapons or other contraband into the facility.”

Mr. Florence’s lawyer, Susan Chana Lask, said that would make sense if her client were “Houdini in reverse” — a master of becoming incarcerated though blameless, in the hope of passing along contraband to confederates waiting for him inside.

In his dissent in Mr. Florence’s case, Judge Louis H. Pollak, a former dean of Yale Law School, was also skeptical of the majority’s theory. “One might doubt,” he wrote, “that individuals would deliberately commit minor offenses such as civil contempt — the offense for which Florence was arrested — and then secrete contraband on their persons, all in the hope that they will, at some future moment, be arrested and taken to jail to make their illicit deliveries.”

In urging the Supreme Court not to hear Mr. Florence’s case, officials from Burlington County, N.J., allowed that “perhaps petitioner’s frustration is understandable.”

But jails are dangerous places, the brief said. “It might even be argued that those arrested on nonindictable or other ‘minor’ offenses would be particularly anxious,” the brief reasoned, to make sure that everyone around them was thoroughly searched.

Mr. Florence’s son has drawn a lesson from what he saw from the back seat in 2005. “If he sees a cop and we’re together,” Mr. Florence testified in 2006, “he still asks, ‘Daddy, are you going to jail?’ ”

•

I wrote recently about a criminal libel action in Paris over a book review. On Thursday, a French court ruled against the unhappy author, Karin Calvo-Goller, saying she had abused the judicial process by complaining about a review that did not go beyond “the limits of free criticism to which all authors of intellectual works expose themselves.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2011, on page A17 of the New York edition.

NEW DELHI – Anna Halder sat on a patch of packed mud and dialed her cell phone Tuesday, clinging to the hope that her parents or sisters somehow survived under the wreckage of their collapsed apartment building and would pick up.

“It’s ringing,” she said. No one answered. She dialed again.

At least 66 people were killed and 73 were injured after the crude brick building crashed down in a congested New Delhi neighborhood. By Tuesday evening, as rescue workers continued to tear through the pile of broken bricks, twisted iron rods and concrete slabs, hope for finding more survivors was fading.

The building collapsed Monday about the time families were cooking dinner. Halder, 18, had not yet returned from her job as a housekeeper. Her working-class family, like millions of other migrants, moved to New Delhi hoping to get jobs in the growing Indian capital.

They, and many others from West Bengal, found housing in the crude brick building in the Lalita Park neighborhood near the Yamuna River because it was one of the rare homes they could afford amid the skyrocketing real estate prices in the crowded city.

But the building was two floors higher than legally allowed, and its foundation appeared to have been weakened by water damage following monsoon rains. The soil near the river is too weak to support such tall buildings, New Delhi Lt. Gov. Tejendra Khanna said.

Poor construction material and inadequate foundations often are blamed for building collapses in India. In New Delhi, where land is at a premium, unscrupulous builders often break building laws to add additional floors to existing structures.

Police were hunting the building’s owner, Amrit Singh, who residents said had fled the area. Officials evacuated another of Singh’s buildings next door, after finding its basement was also flooded.

When the building fell, residents said they heard a rumble like thunder. They sprinted to the site and tried to reach those inside by digging with their hands into the piles of concrete, bricks and mortar before police and rescue teams arrived.

“There were so many dead bodies, there was no movement at all,” said Dil Nawaz Ahmed, a 25-year-old journalist who lives nearby. He said he managed to help free five injured residents, but mainly pulled out bodies, which he carried to waiting ambulances. “There were many women and children.”

Rescuers sawed through iron rods and shifted concrete with a bulldozer. Sniffer dogs searched out people. Ambulances parked nearby at the ready. Women crying over lost loved ones were led away.

Malti Halder was still waiting for information about her husband and daughter. She is was not related to Anna Halder; the name is common in West Bengal where many of the residents had come from.

“I did not find them at the hospital. I’ve been searching for them since last night but have not found them,” she said.

M.D. Shahanawaz, a 23-year-old student, teared up as his hopes for a friend who lived in the building dwindled.

“He’s dead,” he said. “Everybody is coming out critical or dead.”

When workers carried a body away from the site on a stretcher, nearby rescuers stopped what they were doing and clasped their hands together in respect for the dead.

One woman whose granddaughter was killed wailed in grief from a nearby roof.

Dozens of black-and-white photographs of the dead hung on the wall outside a mortuary so relatives and friends could identify the bodies of their loved ones.

One man carried away the body of a small boy wrapped in a white sheet.

From another family, Jamuna Halder sat outside on a curb. “My husband is gone. My children are injured in the hospital,” she said.

She lived with her husband and three children in a room for 2,400 rupees ($54) a month after their nearby slum dwelling was demolished. She had been out cleaning houses when the building collapsed. “When I came back, I saw this tragedy had happened.”

___

Associated Press writers Nirmala George and Kevin Frayer contributed to this report.